U.S. Strategy: Evolve or Perish
Source: The National Interest, 4/29/2011
ASP Chairman former Sen. Gary Hart is a featured author.
By Gary Hart
The answer we give to three questions will largely determine whether the United States will flourish or decline in the 21st century. First, will we anticipate events or merely react to them? Second, will we form new alliances to address new realities? Third, how rapidly will we adapt to transformational change?
These questions share an assumption: the world is changing and it is changing fast. Our national predisposition, however, has been to rely on traditional institutions and policies and to use them to address unfolding history on our own timetable.
We also are inclined to employ a simple, all-encompassing, central organizing principle as a substitute for a national strategy. During the second half of the twentieth century that principle was containment of communism. After 9/11 it became war on terrorism. Unfortunately, the period in between, the largely peaceful and prosperous 1990s, was not used to develop a comprehensive strategic approach to an almost totally different new century that was emerging.
One lone effort represents the exception. The U.S. Commission on National Security for the 21st Century produced a road map for national security for the first quarter of the century. It was almost totally ignored and of its fifty specific recommendations only one, the creation of a Department of Homeland Security, has been adopted a decade later…
